Have you been hiding in obscurity for too long and are longing to be centre stage?
Here is a sure-fire way to kick-start your classical music career and get you centre stage: become a page turner! Consider the following tributes of two legendary musicians and page turners and remember: you too can make it big as a classical musician!
The first tribute comes from concerts notes of an unidentified chamber music recital:
Tonight's page turner, Ruth Spike, studied under Ivan Schmertnick at the Boris Nitsky School of Page Turning in Philadelphia. She has been turning pages here and abroad for many years for some of the world's leading pianists.
Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies, omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every page ... we soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated.
—David Hume (1711–1776)
In 1988, Ms. Spike won the Wilson Page Turning Scholarship, which sent her to Israel to study page turning from left to right. She is the winner of the 1984 Rimsky Korsakov Flight of the Bumblebee Prestissimo Medal, having turned 47 pages in an unprecedented 32 seconds. She was also a 1983 silver medalist at the Klutz Musical Page Pickup Competition: contestants retrieve and rearrange a musical score dropped from a Yamaha. Ms. Spike excelled in "grace, swiftness, and especially poise."
For techniques, Ms. Spike performs both the finger licking and the bent-page corner methods. She works from a standard left bench position, and is the originator of the dipped-elbow page snatch, a style used to avoid obscuring the pianist's view of the music.
She is page-turner in residence in Fairfield Iowa, where she occupies the coveted Alfred Hitchcock Chair at the Fairfield Page Turning Institute.
The second tribute goes to my beloved guitar teacher of many years:
You will, I am sure, agree with me that ... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
A Guitarist page turner has the challenge of having to remain inconspicuous for the entire performance right next to the performer, centre stage with no grand piano to hide behind.
Prof Dr. L. Witos, a first class performer and guitarist himself, has worked tirelessly on page turning techniques for guitarists. In the year 1985 he perfected his revolutionary method of the Dash and Dive act.
He positions himself among the audience – preferable the first row - and at the exact right time dashes towards the music stand with lightening speed, turns the page from right to left (as he is now in front of the performer) and sits down again. All this he does with such swiftness and finesse that the audience is too bamboozled to take any notice. It needs to be noted that Dr. Witos always works from memory and knows by heart all the music and the particular editions his students play from. To this very day he has never missed a page turn and all his students trust and admire him exceedingly.
CJ Lucerne is a music teacher, classical guitarist and early music enthusiast. She performs regularly with the Kepler Ensemble and produces play along CD's. For more tips (seriously!) and free music for classical guitar go her website:.